Trump wasn’t making much effort to pretend his focus in Georgia was on the party’s fate. The ongoing Senate races were distracting attention from him, from his vastly larger issue. Also, he was getting blamed for the fact that the GOP was still fighting those races, with the Senate majority hanging in the balance. He was sour about this, believing that he had saved the Senate, he alone, basically. Every poll had put the Senate down, but his coattails had carried them. It was further proof that the election had been stolen from him, that the Senate, which so many had written off, had been saved, nearly. Now he was expected to help save the Georgia Senate seats for the Republicans when the Republicans weren’t doing shit to save Georgia for him.

Especially Georgia’s governor, Brian Kemp, whom Trump had supported. (He had also, against his better judgment, supported Kemp’s choice of Kelly Loeffler, at the time a tepid Trump supporter, to replace her Republican predecessor in the Senate, Johnny Isakson, who had resigned for health reasons.) Kemp was actually going so far as to say the Georgia election had been a fair one when, obviously, it had been so unfair!

On December 5, the presidential party took the small plane (not the big Air Force One) and flew to Valdosta, Georgia, for Trump’s first rally after the election—indeed, the first time he had done an event in what might be his post-defeat status (if defeat happened, but it couldn’t happen, because he had won, a constant qualifying and amending that had entered his permanent speech patterns), an event theoretically not at all about him. Indeed, it was one of the few events he had ever done in which, quite likely, he would get no personal benefit.

He was doing this only because incumbent Georgia senator David Perdue had been such an abject and loyal supporter. And because he’d be blamed if he didn’t. But he wouldn’t have done it for Loeffler—never liked her. And Kemp! No way.

Meadows was trying to manage the president’s volatile mood. Whatever the president’s agenda was (mostly to keep insisting he had won Georgia and to insult Kemp), Meadows was trying to shepherd his own.